Every "small" Google Tag Manager change forces you through the same process as a production deployment. And you're the one carrying the risk.
If you've ever felt like GTM changes take too long, you're not imagining it. This isn't a skill problem. It's a structural one.
Setup pain is a one-time event. Iteration pain is forever. Every campaign, every A/B test, every "just one more button."
Setup Is Painful Once. Iteration Is Painful Forever.
Everyone suffered through GTM setup once. The tutorials exist, the workarounds are documented, and eventually you get live. Fine.
But nobody talks about what comes after. The GTM workflow is slow every single time you need to change something. By month three, it stops feeling like a learning curve. It starts feeling like a GTM productivity killer stuck into your calendar permanently.
"Just One More Button": What Actually Happens
A stakeholder says: "Can you just add a click tracker to that new button?"
Here's the real sequence:
- Find the selector. You inspect the element. The class name is generic, shared across dozens of elements. You try something more specific. It works in preview. On this page.
- Test page two. Same CTA, different landing page. Nothing fires. Different class, different structure. Back to square one.
- Desktop works. Mobile doesn't. The responsive layout renders the button differently. You adjust, retest, adjust again.
- Ping a developer. You're not confident the selector is stable across the site. They get back to you in 4 hours. Maybe 24. Nothing moves.
- Publish terrified. You hit publish and immediately open GA to babysit the data. You won't trust it until tomorrow.
- Watch for days. Data latency means you can't confirm it's working until 24-48 hours later. If something's off, the whole loop starts over.
- Total time for "just one button": 2-4 business days. And this is what "simple GTM changes" actually looks like as a daily reality.
- Now multiply this by every campaign, every landing page variant, every experiment. GTM doesn't slow you down once. It taxes every decision you make going forward.
The Tool Wasn't Built for This
Here's what makes GTM iteration slow at a structural level: it doesn't distinguish between a minor tweak and a major deployment. Every change goes through the same heavy validation loop.
That's by design. GTM was built by engineers to protect enterprise sites from misconfigured tags. Reasonable goal. But "protect against worst case" and "support daily marketing velocity" are not the same thing.
You're responsible for speed in a tool optimized for caution. That mismatch isn't a bug. It's the architecture.
The Organizational Knife Twist
The technical friction is bad enough. The reputation damage is worse.
Stakeholders think it's "just one button." You can't explain why it took 3 days without sounding incompetent. The GTM workflow for marketers creates a gap between what people expect and what the tool actually allows, and that gap lands entirely on you.
GTM makes you look slow when the tool is slow.
Google Tag Manager on Easy Mode
The fix isn't to get better at GTM. If you've been doing this for months, you already are.
The fix is removing the steps that carry the risk: hunting for selectors that might break, guessing whether a class name survives a deploy, publishing without knowing if it'll actually work. That's where the time goes. That's where the anxiety lives.
TagCompanion removes all of it. It's the missing piece Google Tag Manager never built.
Instead of tags, triggers, and variables, the workflow is: what do you want to track, where on the page, on which page, what do you want to call the event. Done. Point-and-click, ready-to-import GTM container in 15 minutes.
Not for developers. Not for complex setups. For the 95% of everyday tracking that every marketer needs to ship and can never ship fast enough. This is what a GTM workflow slow problem actually looks like when it's solved.
This is what it looks like when GTM stops slowing you down. See how it works
